I went looking for this book as a gift for a friend (she’s not getting my copy) to find that Amazon have some great specials on it.

If you don’t have Cooking with Hot Flashes, you can get a cheap copy now.

It’s a great followup to Martha’s earlier book on laughing your way through middle age, “Didn’t My Skin Used to Fit?”.

All the physical and mental changes that come with aging can be depressing, but Martha Bolton shows how we can choose to look at the humourous side of it. She encourages us to accept and even giggle at every new wrinkle and sagging body part.

It’s all good-natured fun and reading just one chapter a day will kick you out of any doldrums.

Do you suffer from memory loss, have you developed flappy arms? Don’t give in, read Martha instead.

Cooking With Hot Flashes: And Other Ways To Make Middle Age Profitable (amazon.com)

From amazon.ca

One former favourite hasn’t lasted the time test (or perhaps I’ve changed?), but one book is still the very best for me. I’ll deal with the one that I found disappointing first.

The Menopause Survival Guide: Surviving the Change of Life

I liked this book in 2003 but now I find much of it annoying. It’s a good basic book in simple language written by Donna Rogers who describes herself as a survivor of menopause. If you haven’t come across the medical terminology before it’s very useful and a good book to keep on your shelf. It outlines some very sensible ways to deal with the hot flash – hot flush and the glossary is a good touch.

Rogers also includes chapters for the families of menopausal women in “Surviving the Change of Wife” (for husbands) and “Meno Moms” (for kids). These are fine, but there’s another chapter on ‘male menopause’ which I would have preferred Rogers to have left out completely.

Still the best

New Menopausal Years, The Wise Woman Way: Alternative Approaches for Women 30-90

Susun Weed considers the whole woman, not just your physical symptoms and she’s truly uplifting to read. She approaches menopause as another step in our life path, gives a whole new way to look at change, and inspires you to become a better and more fulfilled woman.

Perhaps it’s because I feel that Weed understands the pain that hits many of us when we realise we have actually reached this stage, that our fertile years have passed. I know I experienced a real grief when this simple fact hit me. I felt somehow useless.

But, as Weed explains, menopause is a new opportunity for personal growth!

I’ve mentioned Susun Weed and her alternative healing approach before, but it was a long time back. A background to Susan Weed, her philosophy and work.

The book which I totally recommend is Our Bodies, Ourselves: A New Edition for a New Era. It’s over there in the column to your right.

The pharmaceutical manufacturers have changed menopause from a natural life transition into a disease requiring treatment by labeling all aspects of normal aging and midlife problems as menopausal.

Naturally the drug companies have no concern for anything other then their profit columns and if this causes anguish and pain to millions of women why should they care?

Making menopause something that has to be “cured” does two things.

Firstly it encourages an unnaturally pessimistic view of menopause that will have repercussions for all women.

Secondly it leads to menopausal women being stereotyped as neurotic, unstable and not in complete control.

This makes us seen as women who cannot make rational decisions. And it can be used against us to dismiss legitimate grievances! (“She’s going through the Change you know”). It can also be freely used to discriminate against mature women in areas such as employment.

Straight out misogyny

The defining of a normal bodily state as diseased, the suggestion that women become worthless with the loss of childbearing capacities, the ideas behind the importance of sexual attractiveness are all based in pure unadulterated misogyny. Nothing else.

Sandra Coney exposes the profit line behind the whole mess.

I’ve read her work before, she was the co-author of the investigative report which outlined an unethical study at the premier womens’ hospital in New Zealand.

Coney exposed earlier unethical study

This study, started in 1966, involved following women with major cervical abnormalities without treating them – by 1987 many had developed cervical cancer and some had died. These women were not treated for their cancers, the cancers were studied!

The lives of women meant nothing as male doctors charted the development and progress of cervical cancer and, incidentally, greatly advanced their own careers.

The revelations led to a Committee of Inquiry, called the Cartwright Inquiry after the presiding judge, Judge Dame Silvia Cartwright (later New Zealand’s Governor General). Her report was a blueprint for patients’ rights in New Zealand and recommended a National Cervical Screening Programme.

Ever since then, I’ve picked up whatever Coney has written.

Yes, Sandra Coney is definitely good value. In this book she challenges the management of menopause by modern medicine. By labeling middle-aged women as estrogen-deficient, male medical professionals and pharmaceutical companies have intervened by creating a pathology of midlife. Then they happily (and profitably) manufacture therapies to ‘cure’ it.

The book includes some blatant examples of the sexism involved in the advertising of hormone therapy.

My favourite (!) is the misogynist slogan, “Menrium treats the menopausal symptoms that bother him the most,” and brace yourself for Coney’s quotations from doctors’ descriptions of the ‘physical unattractiveness’ of the postmenopausal female body.

This book is a few years old now, but the information is even more relevant to us today as more and more women reach that ‘certain age’.

Highly recommended

The Menopause Industry: How the Medical Establishment Exploits Women : amazon.com : amazon.ca